6 ms·

Clever (YC S12) Gets $30M to Become the Login Layer for Education Apps

93 points by sethbannon 12y ago

sethbannon 12y ago
Using technology to spur innovation in the education space is so easy to get behind.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
schimmy_changa 12y ago
I think many people might not realize how much education has changed since they were in school (K-12) - there are now hundreds of educational apps specializing in all parts of the curriculum. It's crazy to organize (hence why Clever is loved by schools) but the proliferation of apps is very useful for teachers to find the right tools for them.
- schimmy_changa 12y ago
  (also I should probably mention that I work for Clever!)
- ZeroFries 12y ago
  How does this education ecosystem change in other developed countries? Do they have the same abundance of apps and options? Does clever have any plans on moving into these other countries (Canada, Europe, Australia)?
  - schimmy_changa 12y ago
    hmm - I can't really speak about the differences (sorry!), and have to be lame and punt your 'future plans' question to the quote from our CEO: “Our goal is to help all schools, and that includes international as well,” Bosmeny told me
- wooyi 12y ago
  Colin - does that mean Clever is now more an App Store for schools? How relevant is the data APIs to SISes and the stuff that was initially Clever.
  - schimmy_changa 12y ago
    Very essential - account provisioning / the API is the first step for an app to be useful to a teacher / students. As the top-rated comment suggests, we only help schools share the basic 'student 123 is in class 456'-type data with apps to allow this. (see the docs for more: https://clever.com/developers https://clever.com/developers) We then added Instant Login since we found it was a huge pain point, and similarly it is very lightweight. You're right that it has more and more features that you'd expect from an app store, but that was true before Instant Login as well :)
hashtree 12y ago
First, congrats on the raising of funds! Last time I spoke with higher ups at Clever, it was mentioned that deep integrations were not on the roadmap (e.g. pushing into SISes like Infinite Campus for things like health, attendance, grades, etc). Some of that has to do with how the problem is being approached technically at Clever, IMO. While tackling student logins and thin system integrations is cool, are there yet plans to go deeper? For a time, I had very seriously considered entering this particular space as a competitor, as I am referred to do integrations, where Clever falls short, for districts on an almost weekly basis (which I decline these days). As a competitor, it was my intention to include extremely deep/bi-directional integrations with all systems (including SISes, like Infinite Campus), purely horizontally scaling infrastructure, process/data isolation (security and privacy is a huge concern for districts), distributed processing so that data never need to leave local district data centers, taking functional/stream programming concepts to allow for fully customized integrations per-district built on the same base for each directional system integration, mock integrations for staff members to play with their rules, etc. It can all be done on a technical front (I did on a per-district basis, many times), but I eventually decided it wasn't a great fit for where I wanted to go in business. I mention all this because I hope someone, perhaps you Clever (knowing you are HNers), addresses this huge need by the districts. So much energy is being spent on things that shouldn't be issues at all... It's a horrible joke that districts have to spend energy on unified login systems, but it is also a joke that moving grades/attendance back and forth between systems for state reporting, for instance. It is not something teachers should have to spend time on. Syncing of student accounts, teacher accounts, admin accounts, enrollments for each, courses, sections, permissions, grades, attendance, health, ILPs, RtI, etc.. it goes on and on. You have the funding and man-power to pull it off, I'd love to see it.
- hashtree 12y ago
  BTW, with deeper integrations... you open up some unique opportunities to solve big problems for districts: Done right, deep integrations mean you, in-effect, have a way to get to all data within a district (data warehouses go for six to eight figures and districts eat it up, as you know). The power of being able to get to data district-wide... You have that obvious route for analytics and reporting now, but what if you were to take the next step... ML/NLP/AI... you can do truly interesting work now. Measure teacher effectiveness, dropout prediction well before it occurs, academic achievement prediction to catch kids before teachers can (because you see the whole picture), recommending interventions that have worked for students in similar scenarios, etc. Now that's cool.
jimbokun 12y ago
So Clever is the App Store for education?
maxpain 12y ago
anyone know the valuation?
greattypo 12y ago
We’re also hiring. We have some extremely ambitious goals, and we need more great engineers to hit them. Check us out at https://clever.com/about/jobs https://clever.com/about/jobs or let me know if you'd like to learn more: dan.mccarthy@clever.com
- 23david 12y ago
  Awesome^3. Keep it up :-)
bsder 12y ago
Um, is anybody NOT overly happy about this? I'm not happy to have yet another centralized login system. I'm not happy to have yet another company collecting analytics. I'm especially not happy that those analytics are about children. I was going to slag startups about security, but, hell, big companies don't bother either, so that would be unfair.
- 2arrs2ells 12y ago
  Thanks for raising this issue. I'm one of the founders of Clever, a former educator, & super privacy conscious. I'm really proud of the work we're doing for a few big reasons: 1. When schools adopt Clever, they often tell us about the way they were setting up software previously. It's always inefficient (i.e. teachers hand-entering class lists every week), but all too often insecure (i.e. faxing attendance sheets, or emailing XLS files to a support team). Clever improves both efficiency and security dramatically. 2. Without centralized login systems, teachers report just getting their class logged in to an app takes 25% of class time on average. The friction of using technology is preventing students from learning. Clever eliminates that friction. 3. Clever is a tool schools use to manage their applications. They manage data sharing & own any data in Clever (our TOS & Privacy Policy make this very clear). Please let me know (dan@clever.com) if you have suggestions for how we can improve privacy or security for students. It's our top priority & one of the biggest reasons we raised this round.
  - mikegioia 12y ago
    teachers report just getting their class logged in to an app takes 25% of class time on average That sounds made-up to me. That would imply some classes spend upwards of 40% of their time logging kids in to an app? Clever improves both efficiency and security dramatically. How? Also how is faxing/emailing attendance sheets any less secure than routing their precious data through your servers?
    - SystemOut 12y ago
      First off, I am not with Clever but I have spent a fair amount of time looking at their platform. Being in the industry, I think the 25% number is high. It is a significant frustration especially in lower grades if kids have different username/passwords for every education app they are using during their school week. I think this is a pretty good idea and it helps. However as schools move to Chromebooks more and more I do wonder if schools will push more for vendors to just integrate directly with Google's login since all users have to have a Google account to use the Chromebook. Maybe Clever supports this? I haven't looked into it lately. The way they improve efficiency is due to fact that schools will no longer need to upload CSV files nightly to vendors servers to update their student rosters. Many inner city schools have a very high degree of student transience (meaning kids move schools a lot) and this is a huge pain to update across multiple vendors every day. A lot of vendors support the upload of CSV files to provide an updated list of student rosters. Imagine how much easier it is for the schools if they don't have to do any of that or only have to integrate with one vendor. I can't speak to the security side and how they improve that really. They do charge the vendors at the school level and for many vendors their fees can really eat into their margins and so I still think you see a lot of vendors relying on CSV files. Schools are used to doing this and so setting up one more job to upload the same file every night is not a huge burden to them.
rblatz 12y ago
So what does this offer that a distributed system like shibboleth doesn't offer?

93 points by sethbannon 12y ago

sethbannon 12y ago

Using technology to spur innovation in the education space is so easy to get behind.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

schimmy_changa 12y ago

I think many people might not realize how much education has changed since they were in school (K-12) - there are now hundreds of educational apps specializing in all parts of the curriculum. It's crazy to organize (hence why Clever is loved by schools) but the proliferation of apps is very useful for teachers to find the right tools for them.

schimmy_changa 12y ago
(also I should probably mention that I work for Clever!)
ZeroFries 12y ago
How does this education ecosystem change in other developed countries? Do they have the same abundance of apps and options? Does clever have any plans on moving into these other countries (Canada, Europe, Australia)?
- schimmy_changa 12y ago
  hmm - I can't really speak about the differences (sorry!), and have to be lame and punt your 'future plans' question to the quote from our CEO: “Our goal is to help all schools, and that includes international as well,” Bosmeny told me
wooyi 12y ago
Colin - does that mean Clever is now more an App Store for schools? How relevant is the data APIs to SISes and the stuff that was initially Clever.
- schimmy_changa 12y ago
  Very essential - account provisioning / the API is the first step for an app to be useful to a teacher / students. As the top-rated comment suggests, we only help schools share the basic 'student 123 is in class 456'-type data with apps to allow this. (see the docs for more: https://clever.com/developers https://clever.com/developers) We then added Instant Login since we found it was a huge pain point, and similarly it is very lightweight. You're right that it has more and more features that you'd expect from an app store, but that was true before Instant Login as well :)

hashtree 12y ago

First, congrats on the raising of funds! Last time I spoke with higher ups at Clever, it was mentioned that deep integrations were not on the roadmap (e.g. pushing into SISes like Infinite Campus for things like health, attendance, grades, etc). Some of that has to do with how the problem is being approached technically at Clever, IMO. While tackling student logins and thin system integrations is cool, are there yet plans to go deeper? For a time, I had very seriously considered entering this particular space as a competitor, as I am referred to do integrations, where Clever falls short, for districts on an almost weekly basis (which I decline these days). As a competitor, it was my intention to include extremely deep/bi-directional integrations with all systems (including SISes, like Infinite Campus), purely horizontally scaling infrastructure, process/data isolation (security and privacy is a huge concern for districts), distributed processing so that data never need to leave local district data centers, taking functional/stream programming concepts to allow for fully customized integrations per-district built on the same base for each directional system integration, mock integrations for staff members to play with their rules, etc. It can all be done on a technical front (I did on a per-district basis, many times), but I eventually decided it wasn't a great fit for where I wanted to go in business. I mention all this because I hope someone, perhaps you Clever (knowing you are HNers), addresses this huge need by the districts. So much energy is being spent on things that shouldn't be issues at all... It's a horrible joke that districts have to spend energy on unified login systems, but it is also a joke that moving grades/attendance back and forth between systems for state reporting, for instance. It is not something teachers should have to spend time on. Syncing of student accounts, teacher accounts, admin accounts, enrollments for each, courses, sections, permissions, grades, attendance, health, ILPs, RtI, etc.. it goes on and on. You have the funding and man-power to pull it off, I'd love to see it.

hashtree 12y ago
BTW, with deeper integrations... you open up some unique opportunities to solve big problems for districts: Done right, deep integrations mean you, in-effect, have a way to get to all data within a district (data warehouses go for six to eight figures and districts eat it up, as you know). The power of being able to get to data district-wide... You have that obvious route for analytics and reporting now, but what if you were to take the next step... ML/NLP/AI... you can do truly interesting work now. Measure teacher effectiveness, dropout prediction well before it occurs, academic achievement prediction to catch kids before teachers can (because you see the whole picture), recommending interventions that have worked for students in similar scenarios, etc. Now that's cool.

jimbokun 12y ago

So Clever is the App Store for education?

maxpain 12y ago

anyone know the valuation?

greattypo 12y ago

We’re also hiring. We have some extremely ambitious goals, and we need more great engineers to hit them. Check us out at https://clever.com/about/jobs https://clever.com/about/jobs or let me know if you'd like to learn more: dan.mccarthy@clever.com

23david 12y ago
Awesome^3. Keep it up :-)

bsder 12y ago

Um, is anybody NOT overly happy about this? I'm not happy to have yet another centralized login system. I'm not happy to have yet another company collecting analytics. I'm especially not happy that those analytics are about children. I was going to slag startups about security, but, hell, big companies don't bother either, so that would be unfair.

2arrs2ells 12y ago
Thanks for raising this issue. I'm one of the founders of Clever, a former educator, & super privacy conscious. I'm really proud of the work we're doing for a few big reasons: 1. When schools adopt Clever, they often tell us about the way they were setting up software previously. It's always inefficient (i.e. teachers hand-entering class lists every week), but all too often insecure (i.e. faxing attendance sheets, or emailing XLS files to a support team). Clever improves both efficiency and security dramatically. 2. Without centralized login systems, teachers report just getting their class logged in to an app takes 25% of class time on average. The friction of using technology is preventing students from learning. Clever eliminates that friction. 3. Clever is a tool schools use to manage their applications. They manage data sharing & own any data in Clever (our TOS & Privacy Policy make this very clear). Please let me know (dan@clever.com) if you have suggestions for how we can improve privacy or security for students. It's our top priority & one of the biggest reasons we raised this round.
- mikegioia 12y ago
  teachers report just getting their class logged in to an app takes 25% of class time on average That sounds made-up to me. That would imply some classes spend upwards of 40% of their time logging kids in to an app? Clever improves both efficiency and security dramatically. How? Also how is faxing/emailing attendance sheets any less secure than routing their precious data through your servers?
  - SystemOut 12y ago
    First off, I am not with Clever but I have spent a fair amount of time looking at their platform. Being in the industry, I think the 25% number is high. It is a significant frustration especially in lower grades if kids have different username/passwords for every education app they are using during their school week. I think this is a pretty good idea and it helps. However as schools move to Chromebooks more and more I do wonder if schools will push more for vendors to just integrate directly with Google's login since all users have to have a Google account to use the Chromebook. Maybe Clever supports this? I haven't looked into it lately. The way they improve efficiency is due to fact that schools will no longer need to upload CSV files nightly to vendors servers to update their student rosters. Many inner city schools have a very high degree of student transience (meaning kids move schools a lot) and this is a huge pain to update across multiple vendors every day. A lot of vendors support the upload of CSV files to provide an updated list of student rosters. Imagine how much easier it is for the schools if they don't have to do any of that or only have to integrate with one vendor. I can't speak to the security side and how they improve that really. They do charge the vendors at the school level and for many vendors their fees can really eat into their margins and so I still think you see a lot of vendors relying on CSV files. Schools are used to doing this and so setting up one more job to upload the same file every night is not a huge burden to them.

rblatz 12y ago

So what does this offer that a distributed system like shibboleth doesn't offer?